To My Friends In India Who Happen To Be Affiliate Marketers...

I've never hidden the fact that I track the readership of this blog. It's not that I get all that much traffic, but I do get a big thrill knowing that I have reached people from around the world. Interestingly, in the past few days, DoctorDalai.com has been viewed several thousand times by someone in the Czech Republic. To that poor fellow, I can only say, "Děkuji!"

But as the title above might suggest, I continue to be plagued by "comments" that invariably originate from India. I put "comments" in quotes because these "comments" have nothing to do with the post they "comment" on, but rather are thinly-veiled attempts at SPAM, pushing everything from gambling websites to taxi-services in England. Last night, I even got one from an AI company:

(AI Company) has left a new comment on your post "How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on your post "How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on ..."": (AI Company) has developed a Interactive Streaming and AI Platform for medical imaging. We own a intellectual property and patent to a new cloud technology platform in medical imaging. At (AI Company) technology and patents covers secure and highly available cloud storage of medical imaging using supercomputing clusters, advanced 2D and 3D diagnostic visualization of medical images using GPU clusters, and the use of Artificial Intelligence in computer aided detection of medical images using genetic algorithm or convolution nueral networks.

Link: Interactive Streaming Artificial Intelligence Platform

Misspellings are theirs. Here is the tracking information on this "comment":

Jubilee Hills, India, Atria Convergence Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Broadband   49.204.222.47

And to make the morning complete, I got another such SPAM comment later on:

Unknown: 7:38 AM (59 minutes ago)to me
Unknown has left a new comment on your post "Driving "Miss Taxi"":

its very good and nice blog

taxi park
bromley superb airport transfer taxi
minicabs bromley

Here's the tracking information on this "comment":

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, Airtel Broadband   171.60.225.12  

Here's what's going on. There is a practice out there in the Aether called "Affiliate Marketing". The Wikipedia article is rather long and convoluted, but the gist of it is this:

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

More simply:

Affiliate marketing is yet another way for less-than-industrious folks to insert themselves into someone else's revenue stream. Kinda like Enron for dummies.

In the case of my "commenters", they operate under the belief that I will allow their "comments" to be published to my blog, which I DO NOT. If I were to allow it, my innocent readers would then click the links, and the "commenter" would then get some small pittance for each click. That's how this works. Sometimes the "comments" are placed manually, sometimes by 'bots that key on to one word in the blog-post, such as you see above.

Here's what happens when I'm informed about one of these SPAM "comments". First, Blogger.com, the platform where this blog resides, allows me to label the comment as SPAM and keep it from publishing, and that is what I do with each one. Second, I DO click the links, and then contact each and every business involved. I make sure the owner of said business knows that they are wasting their money on the (presumably) cheap marketing, that this is really BAD advertising which brings them nothing but animosity.

I did have one business owner admit to using this bottom-feeder practice, and promised to fire his "affiliate". And he promised that AGAIN when I got another barrage of "comments" leading to his site that originated in, you guessed it, India.

I don't know if it is a language or a cultural barrier, but every single affiliate marketing blog comment spammer I've encountered has come from India. Perhaps this sort of thing is acceptable in that market. I hate to be the one to tell you guys, but it is NOT appreciated here. Not one little bit.

So cut it out. Now. CEASE AND DESIST. You won't make one Rupee from this, and you will likely be removed as an affiliate from the company you try to dump on my blog. Stop this nonsense and find a REAL job.

Thank you.

Addendum:

I got ANOTHER spam from the AI company, and so I'll reveal its name:  http://lifevoxel.com/  One has to worry about a place that has to use this bottom-feeder form of advertising.